Thursday, October 29, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 is here - time to triple boot a Mac!

I picked a great day to fix my dual/triple booting problems. For the past two days, I was having problems with reinstalling OSX 10.6 due to partitioning and repartitioning. Finally, I stumbled upon a tip to reset my PRAM. That worked and I described the steps in my previous articles. Today in the morning I reset my PRAM, reinstalled OSX, applied the latest Time Machine backup and then installed Windows 7 64-bit with Bootcamp. Then I downloaded Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 ISO from the Ubuntu site. Burned it to CD and then booted to it pressing "C". Ran the usual install, during partitioning I chose the following:

When it finished installing, I rebooted (I installed refit earlier) and chose the Windows partition. Once picked, grub appeared. Picked the first in the list, which was Ubuntu and then I was in. Ran into many problems because Macs don't play too well with Ubuntu. Followed tutorials on Ubuntu forums and got it running. Installed propriatory drivers and got wifi and video working fine. Trackpad is taking time getting used to. You need to 1-click to drag a window.

After all that, I rebooted and picked Windows partition and instead of choosing Ubuntu, picked Windows (last entry in the list). Now I am blogging from the Windows partition. Installed all the apps I need using this great tool called Ninite. Now I got a fully working triple-boot.